Waterloo Lecture on Social Innovation: Adam Kahane on Power & Love
The Waterloo Lecture on Social Innovation highlights world-class thinkers with new ideas on how to achieve significant, durable social change for our most pressing problems. Social Innovation Generation (SiG@Waterloo) and our partners, Centre for International Governance Innovation, Capacity Waterloo Region, Region of Waterloo, and Musagetes, were pleased to have internationally acclaimed facilitator and author, Adam Kahane, join us on January 27, 2010, as our featured speaker.
“Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political and economic change… What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic."
Martin Luther King, Jr.
At the Waterloo Lecture on Social Innovation, Adam Kahane discussed power, our desire to achieve our own purposes, and love, our desire to heal the whole, as complementary drives that are both required to effect sustainable social innovation and change. Kahane drew on his extensive experience with designing and leading complex multi-stakeholder change processes to offer practical guidance for effectively balancing these two--always present, usually polarised, often undiscussable--drives.
Read An Introduction to Power and Love: A Theory and Practice of Social Change.
About Adam Kahane
Adam Kahane is a partner in Reos Partners, an international organisation dedicated to supporting and building capacity for innovative collective action in complex social systems. He is also an Associate Fellow of the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School.
Adam is a leading organizer, designer and facilitator of processes through which business, government, and civil society leaders can work together to address their toughest challenges. He has worked in more than fifty countries, in every part of the world, with executives and politicians, generals and guerillas, civil servants and trade unionists, community activists and United Nations officials, clergy and artists.
Adam is the author of Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2004). Nelson Mandela said: “This breakthrough book addresses the central challenge of our time: finding a way to work together to solve the problems we have created.” Adam’s second book, Power and Love: A Theory and Practice of Social Change, was published in January 2010.